


vice

by besselfcn



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Elias Bouchard is his own warning, Emotional Manipulation, F/M, Forced Orgasm, Gags, Hopeful Ending, Implied Somnophilia, Mind Manipulation, Power Dynamics, Sexual Abuse, Threats of Violence, or at least as hopeful as the magnus archives ever is
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-27
Updated: 2020-08-27
Packaged: 2021-03-06 18:42:38
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,674
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26143552
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/besselfcn/pseuds/besselfcn
Summary: With few exceptions, people bore him.
Relationships: Elias Bouchard/Melanie King
Comments: 24
Kudos: 42





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I have tried my very best to tag this appropriately, but just to make it **abundantly** clear: This is a fic about Elias sexually abusing Melanie over the period of several weeks, from the end of 106 until the S3 finale. It is from his perspective. It is not any _less_ hopeful than the actual podcast, if that... helps. 
> 
> Thank you to Jess & Parker & Sci for their hungry baby bird mouths waiting for this.

That first foray into her mind was a business decision more than it was anything else. For the good of the institute, and the good of its employees — _including_ , despite her protestations, _herself_ — he had had to engage in a few unpleasant realities. It was not the first time, nor the last; only the most recent.

With few exceptions, people bore him; their minds especially. Their fears, more specifically, although there isn’t much more _to_ a human mind than fear and the things it does to escape those fears. It’s fourteen little boxes people can be sorted into almost without any effort at all. Here is Tim, and the Stranger; here is Martin, and the Lonely. Jon once feared the Eye, and the white hot spark of pain and pleasure that gave Elias had almost been enough to satiate him. Almost.

But _Melanie_. When he presses past the soap-bubble-thin blockade of her consciousness, he finds the slick upon the surface is not fear but _anger_. He drains it away, of course; replaces it for a moment with the Desolation, or an exhaustingly mundane version of it.

By the time he is finished, though, the anger already pools around the edges, nearly shoves him backwards with the force of its rushing back in. And it is _that_ , that cold fusion of hatred and stubbornness that makes and re-makes itself from nothingness, that makes him — well.

Everyone has their vices.

* * *

The common wisdom is to wait twenty-four hours before deciding whether something is a true desire or merely a base impulse. He gives himself forty-eight.

He sees her as she stalks down the hall: steps careful, fists clenched, teeth grinding together like coarse grit sandpaper. He takes a deep draw of that rage, indulges in its purity before she enters the room and it becomes inevitably soiled with fear.’

She opens the door. “Elias.”

Her hands are on her hips; her lips are pursed. She’s wearing a crisp button down shirt and a pleated skirt that balloons out from her waist. Still dressed for the glamour of internet ghost stories.

“Sit down, Melanie,” he says. Before she can sink down into the chair, he clarifies: “On the desk.”

She freezes for only a moment before realization ricochets through her. “Oh, fuck no,” she snarles, and lunges for the door — but he’s not stupid, and she stumbles backwards with the force of the image that pushes itself into her mind. Melanie, her head tipped back, fighting for air with his fingers around her throat; the sweet images he’d occupied himself with for the last forty-eight hours of consideration.

“I don’t want it to have to be like that, Melanie,” he says plainly, his hands guiding her back to the desk by the hips. She’s still gasping, struggling against fingers that aren’t there. “I am perfectly happy for this to take a much simpler avenue.”

“Stop,” she manages. He lifts her onto the desk; she is thin but muscular, and he notes the way her hands push at his forearms.

“Melanie,” he says, very sternly. “I do not want this to be more unpleasant for you than it has to be.”

He pushes again; a broken wrist, a face shoved cruelly into shag carpeting. These are desires, not memories, and they come with the hazy quality of such — but she can surely still taste in them the ease of it all, the complete lack of effort it would take on Elias’s part to bring them into crystalline reality.

Her body stills. The anger in her eyes still burns white-hot; he lets it soak down to his bones.

“Thank you,” he says politely, and he pushes his hand up into her skirts and begins to touch her.

It is heady, this first violation. The same way it was when he caught a glimpse of that burning mind that sits inside her. Hot flesh and twitching agony, sparks of pain that sizzle through her body as he slides his fingers deeper inside her. She tries so hard not to cry, but when he slips a third finger in the pain shatters her, draws great wracking sobs from behind the rage coating her skin.

“Stop,” she begs. She _begs_. “Stop it, or finish it, I don’t care, just _stop_ , it fucking _hurts_ —”

He draws his fingers out and wipes them on her thigh. She shivers everywhere, exhales a punched breath through her teeth and tries to stand.

He’s more forceful this time, with what he needs from her. Hooks his hands around her calves and pulls her forward, upsets her balance until her head slams backwards on the hard oak of his desk. She cries out, hands flying to her head to quiet the ringing, and in the moment’s silence he frees himself from his pants so he can finally bury himself inside her.

She screams. He thought she might. The handkerchief in his pocket finds her mouth just in time to cut it off with a choked gasp.

“Melanie,” he sighs, letting it wash over him with the sing-song syllables of her name. She isn’t very wet — he hadn’t done much for her, after all, just wanted a trial run of things — but he manages all the same, slow and aching thrusts that feel divine. He tucks the edges of the handkerchief in behind her teeth so she doesn’t spit it out; her throat keeps working as if she’s suffocating, but he knows it’s mostly panic. If she needed, she could breathe in through her nose, or relax her tongue a bit so the air comes easier through her mouth.

But she fights. Isn’t that what drew him to her, after all? The way she fights even when it isn’t good for her?

He feels the orgasm building in the base of his spine. It’s harder now, oddly, to see what she’s thinking; her eyes have gone a determined sort of blank, like she’s clearing any thoughts she has as soon as they arrive. It’s impressive. The sort of meditation one normally achieves in an expensive yoga studio, not being violently fucked over your boss’s desk.

It’s that which brings him to his peak. Watching and reveling in her defiance even as he steals from her something so ancient and basic. He spills inside her, not bothering with any pretense; he’s seen the alarm on her phone for her birth control, watched her swallow it down these last two nights before bed but after brushing her teeth. Wonderfully disciplined.

He withdraws from her. Himself, then the handkerchief, soaked in spit. He uses it to clean himself off, then tosses it in a small wastebasket with a closed lid.

She shakes everywhere as she pushes herself up. He hadn’t even bothered removing her underwear; he’d offer her a change of clothes if he had one, but he hadn’t expected to get so caught up.

He waits patiently, watching her as she stares at him with revulsion. He can’t very well get any more work done until she leaves.

After a few moments where he thinks she might vomit, she swallows her bile and says, “I could go to the hospital right now.”

He raises an eyebrow.

“I could walk out of here,” she says, “and drive myself right to the hospital. Let them scrape around inside me until they have _more_ than enough to send the police marching up your fucking _Institute’s_ steps.”

He sighs. On the inhale he tastes the first pinpricks of anger working their way back to her.

“You could,” he says. “But you won’t.”

She stares at him a moment longer. She really might kill him, one day. He would be honored to see it.

Finally she stumbles to her feet and walks out, one foot in front of the other. The door clicks shut behind her.

He straightens out his sleeves, shuts off the two separate recorders that have set themselves running, and returns to work.


	2. Chapter 2

He tries not to Watch her too often — overindulgence, and all that — but her rage is a crisp, clear bell echoing through the corridors. Sometimes, surely, she is doing it on purpose; sometimes perhaps she even realizes he is Watching, somehow.

It is those times that her imaginings turn the darkest. A knife slicing into his stomach, peeling him open at the core. HIs eyes red and bulging, choking as he struggles to breathe. Her thumbs digging into his eyes until they burst like grapes, blood running rivulets down her wrists.

When he feels she’s getting a bit carried away he slides her glimpses of distraction. Nights spent laughing with her old roommates, days careening down the motorway with her fingers splayed out the window and wind whipping through her hair. She breathes, usually; shakes herself and gets back to work.

He feels better when she does. It isn’t healthy to get so worked up.

* * *

It continues whenever he wants it to continue. He calls her to his office, she fights him in whatever way makes it easier for her to sleep at night, and she gives in. Sometimes more easily than others; once he does have to take her by the throat until he is able to teach her in no uncertain terms that she may either experience this with what little freedom she has left or he will simply take it from her whether she is present or not. He _prefers_ her presence, of course, but he does not require it.

She relinquishes, eventually, and it becomes easier. Easier to push his fingers into her, easier to guide her sweet, angry mouth down to his cock and spill inside her throat. Once he even tastes her, and the high is like nothing else — but he finds she has too much leverage when he is in such a position, and unless he wants to hurt her it is simply too risk to allow himself. And he really doesn’t want to hurt her.

He wants her to _fear_ being hurt, of course. But he doesn’t like to actually _hurt_ her. Not like that. It’s a terribly inefficient way to set about doing the job he wants. Like cutting into steak with a butter knife.

* * *

“All the words for this particular piece of anatomy are so crude, don’t you think?”

He rubs his thumb over her clitoris; inside her, he strokes the soft, yielding muscle and feels how it makes her legs twitch. He’s found herself talking to her more often during these encounters; the silence his words run up against is less discouraging and more of a _challenge_.

“ _Pussy_ sounds like you’re a teenager fooling around after school, doesn’t it?” he muses. “And _cunt_ , ugh. So vulgar. It doesn’t capture the _beauty_ of what you have brought to me here.”

He presses gently at the edges of her mind. It’s still blank and dulled, all wrapped in cloth. She’s gotten good at that; it sends a thrill down his spine, meeting resistance. The rest of the Institute _yields_ to him; she _resists._

But he has been working at her for nearly a half hour now, one hand under her skirts and the other on the back of her neck. A much longer indulgence than he usually allows himself, but it is late and nearly nobody is in the Archives any longer. And three days ago, when he took her the way he likes best — her sprawled out on his desk, papers and books rattling with every thrust — she had inadvertently shuddered out an orgasm of her own, and the shame and agony that roiled off her when she did had been simply _incomparable_.

So he has her here again, this time watching her face, waiting to feel her around his fingers and savor the taste again. She’s getting closer; the dull exterior is cracking, her muscles taut and trembling. She just needs a push.

“Come for me, please, Melanie,” he instructs, and with it the sense-memory of how she felt the last time, and despite her greatest efforts she buckles, a low groan escaping her lungs like a death rattle.

When he slips his fingers into her mouth to clean them off, she bites down with her molars. He digs a thumb into her jaw and the smell of burning flesh into her prefrontal cortex until she lets go.

* * *

She starts wearing trousers to work, after that. It’s rather charming.

He folds them for her, neatly, when he takes them off.

* * *

He dreams of her.

Well, she dreams of him, but what’s the difference, really?

She screams at him all the things she doesn’t in reality. That she’s going to destroy him. That she hopes the entire world burns, and him at the center of it. That she can’t wait to see him unmade.

Once she even kills him. It is messy; it involves a nine-iron that she keeps in her closet _just-in-case_. In case something like Elias follows her home, he supposes.

When she wakes up, ordinarily, she vomits. Then she brushes her teeth and goes back to bed.

* * *

She steals a tape recorder at some point. Pointless, he’s sure she’s aware, but she does it all the same.

She’s drunk when she clicks it on, still holding a glass of sweet rye whiskey. He can’t see it — she is far away, and he is tired — but he can taste it on her tongue.

“I know you’re listening,” she slurs into the tape. “You pathetic _worm_.”

The recording does not get kinder from there.

* * *

Oh, Basira.

Basira finds her in the parking lot. Not anything like _that_ — she finds her leaned against her car, keys in her hands, willing herself to get in the driver’s seat and head home and take a shower instead of walking into A&E.

As if what she is experiencing fits either of those letters.

“Jesus,” Basira says, as soon as she sees her. “I’m taking you home.”

Melanie startles. “No,” she says, “It’s fine —”

“It’s not,” Basira says simply.

They stare at each other. Then Melanie gives her the keys.

Elias has his own commute home, and as routine as driving is he still feels he should keep his eyes on the road. By the time he changes into less formal attire and settles onto the couch with a drink in his hand, Melanie and Basira are sat in Melanie’s own living room, sitting on her cobbled together living room furniture of second hand couches and broken recliners.

“How long has it been going on?”

Melanie barks a laugh. Her anger is so much sharper than it has been in months, undiluted by panic. It drips like candlewax down his spine.

“Which part?” she sneers. She’s a little tipsy, too; a few shots to still her mind, maybe. “The, the manipulation, or me being tied to a fucking _evil institute_ , or him doing his creepy _If I die you all die_ shtick, or —”

“How long has he been raping you.”

Melanie fizzles, like a hot pan plunged into water.

He supposes it’s an accurate word, all things considered. It seems a bit _small_ , perhaps, to carry all the weight of what he has been introducing her too. But sometimes clinical terms are all one has.

“I don’t have to use that word, if you don’t like,” Basira says gently. “I know sometimes it’s difficult to hear it phrased like that. But you seemed like someone who wanted the validation of what’s happening to you, not the euphemism.”

A tiny, fractured nod from Melanie.

“How long,” Melanie repeats. “Um. Couple of weeks. Since — since a bit after I bailed on drinks with you and Martin. _That_ wasn’t,” she clarifies, “the first time. It was a couple days after that. I think he — I don’t know. I don’t.”

Basira nods. He can’t feel her as intensely as he can feel Melanie — he’s gotten so _delightfully_ attuned to her, can pick her out against the background noise with hardly any effort — but he can still taste anger clinically packed away under responsibility. It’s a feeling he’s more than familiar with.

“Has he followed you home?” she asks. “Escalated in any way, since it began?”

Melanie’s shaking her head before she’s even done with her sentence. “No,” she says. “No, no, I don’t think he’s going to… to _kill_ me if that’s what you’re thinking. I don’t think he wants that.”

“What do you think he wants?”

She stills. Fidgest, wriggling until she’s shaking her head. “Dunno,” she admits. “I think he just gets off on it.”

Suspicion pulses through Basira, but she nods. “And how are you coping? _Are_ you coping?”

Melanie laughs again, endlessly hollow. “How am I _coping_ with being — with being _continually sexually assaulted_ at _work?_ ” She scrubs a hand over her face. “I — surprisingly well, actually, I guess. I don’t know.”

She leans back, tips her head up towards the sky. He wonders if Basira can see the imprint of teeth across her collar bone.

“I’ve been writing some of it down,” she admits. “In case, I don’t know. I have to prove to myself it’s real. Or to someone else.” She scoffs. “Sounds fucking ridiculous, really. Dear diary, today my boss fucked me on his desk _, again_. Dear diary, today he made me suck his cock and I wanted to tear it off with my teeth but I was too _scared_ he’d telepathically _mind fuck_ me instead.”

Basira exhales, struggling to keep that composure.

He knows Melanie’s been keeping records. He’s sure she thinks he’s read them, but he hasn’t; once he sees her beginning to write one he turns his attention to other matters. He can, after all, appreciate more than anyone the need for a personal and private archive.

“I’m going to tell you something,” Basira says softly, “and I don’t want you to think it’s minimizing what you’re going through. Because it is fucking awful, it really is. Just… it is horrific, and you have a right to be horrified.”

Melanie swallows. Her throat bobs when she does; he can almost taste the skin there.

“But,” Basira continues. “I worked in the police for _years_. I saw, I don’t know. Too many cases like this. And I can tell you without a doubt that there is _nothing_ special about Elias. Not in this sense.”

Doubt fills Melanie’s mind, but she doesn’t interrupt.

“You’ll be rid of him someday, Mel,” Basira tells her, with a softness that makes Elias’s stomach turn. “One of these days, you’ll never have to see him again.”

He shuts his eyes and stops watching.

* * *

It isn’t an immediate change, after that. But there’s an acrid taste that he can’t quite place when he looks at her now. Something else hidden beneath the anger that tastes like honeyed wine.

* * *

Then, one day, she says, “Why are you doing this?”

It is full of that white-hot rage, though distorted through pain. He looks down at her, her hands held above her head, her back pressed into the floor. The desk had been too full of unsorted paperwork, today.

Speaking to him unravels the careful blankness she keeps in her mind; images of his own snarling face, grotesque memories and feelings of a deep and unreachable pain, flood in to fill the space.

“Because,” he answers her, “I want to.”

She snorts, derisively.

Then comes that acrid, sour taste again. It is not fear anymore, or pain, or anger. It isn’t even confusion. He flags, brows pinched together as he tries to place it, and then —

It’s _boredom._

He feels his own rage rising, for once. He has been consuming hers for so long that he almost forgot what his felt like.

He hits her, just once, but hard enough to feel the pain explode across her body, to feel the indignant anger come rushing back, and he resumes in earnest as he chases that feeling.

* * *

It stops as it started; abruptly. He calls her back to his office a few times after that time, and he revels in the way she feels, but he finds himself with both less inclination and simply less _time_ to dedicate to his own pleasantries. 

So one day he decides not to call for her, and he never does again. 

The apprehension she feels at first, waiting for a call that will never come, is enough to wean him off of the anger. Like his own brand of ketamine. But it settles, finally, until her anger tastes no more intoxicating to him than the others’.

Well. Not _much_ more. 

* * *

The first time she wears a dress to work, it is a dare. If he weren’t so practiced, and if he weren’t so busy simply keeping Jon _alive_ , he may have taken the bait.

As it is, he smiles at her.

“Miss King,” he says. 

“Elias.”

It drips with venom that he soaks in all day long.

* * *

Before the world doesn't end and after an unpleasant conversation with Martin Blackwood, Elias finds a tape recorder running on his desk. 

That isn’t unusual. Melanie’s handwriting across the front of it is. 

He rewinds it to the front of the tape and lets it play, hands folded and eyes shut. 

“I know you’re a busy man,” Melanie’s mechanical voice croaks out, “so I will make this very, very brief.

“You think you’re the Eye. Watching, _Seeing_ everything that we do. And maybe some part of you is. Maybe some part of the Eye is using you to look after the rest of us.

“But _you_ , Elias? You’re not the Eye. You’re not the Web, or the Spiral, or anything that plays tricks on your mind and worms its way into your brain. You aren’t even as dignified as the Hunt. 

“You are the Slaughter. And I cannot _wait_ to watch it come for you.”

Recording ends.

He holds the tape in his hands for a moment longer, feeling its warm and radiating heat, before placing in into a nondescript pile behind him. 

She would have been, he thinks to himself, such a _marvelous_ Archivist.

**Author's Note:**

> Your comments feed me <3


End file.
